Airport security is a critical aspect of air safety throughout the world. In current situations, within the United States and many other countries worldwide, airport security checkpoints have been fast evolving to meet the safety and other concerns of the public, in general. For example, the public demands safe air travel, but also places a premium on their own convenience when traveling within airports. This includes conveniently located safety checkpoints, shorter lines at such safety checkpoints and ease of effort for placing their items such as baggage through x-ray machines and the like.
To address many of these issues, industry and the Transportation Safety Administration (TSA) have been developing new systems in an attempt to increase throughput of the passengers through security checkpoints. However, in many instances, these new systems are very expensive to implement and, in some instances, may even contribute to the problem that they are attempting to solve. By way of one example, the TSA has hired more airport screeners, security personnel and others in an attempt to increase efficiency. Although the addition of more personnel may, in the short term, alleviate some of the inconveniences of passengers, they are very expensive to implement by way of added labor costs and overhead.
Another solution is simply to increase the number of safety checkpoints. This certainly can increase throughput, but this solution also has its shortcomings. First, in order to increase the number of safety checkpoints, more scanning machines are needed. Also, since airports are under extreme space constraints, especially in view of the increased traffic throughout airports in addition to the physical constraints of the buildings themselves, this solution leads to increased congestion and loss of space for airport vendor and support services. This causes loss of revenue to the airport authorities.
By way of example, FIG. 1 shows a conventional layout of a security checkpoint. The conventional layout is depicted generally as reference numeral 100 and includes two substantially identical lanes of security checkpoints 100a and 100b. In this conventional layout, a passenger will first place their baggage and other items at the table 102, which leads to a conventional conveyor 104. However, this area typically has insufficient “buffer” space for passenger divestiture causing congestion, longer queues and the like.
The conveyor 104 then transports the baggage and other items to the x-ray machine 106, at which point a security screener will use a monitor 106a to view the internal contents of the items passing through. At the output of the machine 106, another conventional conveyor 108 is used to transport the baggage to a pick up area 110. Much like the divesture area 102, the pick up area, due to space constraints within the airport, has insufficient buffer space, again, causing congestion, longer queues and the like.
If there was anything suspicious within the baggage, an inspection area 112 is used to manually search through such items near the output area of the system. This inspection area is accessible to the public, which may cause some security concerns. Also, this manual operation, since it is “in-line” with the non-rejected items, may result in congestion at each station, reduce throughput, and increase passenger queue times.
Additionally, a chemical trace detection system 114 may be provided at the output of the system. But, since the chemical trace detection system 114 is very expensive, only one of these systems is used for each pair of checkpoints 102a, 102b. Thus, in case items such as laptops that have been transported through the checkpoint 102b, must be screened, an airport personnel must bring the item to the chemical trace detection system 114 at checkpoint 102a. This leads to more congestion, more time, and more labor needed at each of the checkpoints.
While the baggage is being transported and searched through the system, the passenger is ushered through a metal detector 116. If a suspicious object is detected, the passenger will be manually searched in “hand wand” area 118. Also, due to the limited space associated with each of these systems, only one passenger at a time may place their baggage and other items on the table 102. Thus in this conventional system, the existing checkpoint design has:                limited material handling;        extensive manual operations (rejects, review of suspicious items, rescanning items, etc.);        movement of personnel that is counter to the normal flow, causing congestion and confusion; and        inadequate buffers that cause stoppage of processing operations.        
Thus, this layout has increased passenger queue times resulting in customer dissatisfaction. Long or unpredictable queue times and customer dissatisfaction can lead to decreased travel which causes a negative economic condition at airports. Also, these shortcomings have resulted in the TSA to purchase, install, staff, and maintain additional equipment, adding to overall costs.
The invention is directed to overcoming one or more of the problems as set forth above.